Eleanor Put Your Boots On
by KT the Shimmer Skank
Summary: Ellie Nash, now in her twenties, contemplates her big girl angst.


**_Eleanor Put Your Boots On_**

**-o-o-o-o-**

_Rating: _T for language and alcohol abuse.

_Notes: _I'm not sure if anyone in Degrassi fanfiction remembers me or Ellie Nash, but meh, I was aching to post something. I miss this stuff. I can has reviews?

**-o-o-o-o-**

I reach for the bottle of gin and tilt it into the glass. Glistening clear liquid splashes over ice cubes. I toss in a cherry, a lime wedge, a splash of soda. My mother may have failed me on many levels, but she taught me how to hold my glass steady, with pride, chin up, garnishes fresh. The woman knew how to drink, damn it.

I sip, sitting on the floor of my apartment. I pull my knees in close to my body. I choke on sobs, I scream. I stop. I take a deep breath. I take another sip. It's okay, Ellie. It's going to be okay. The bad feelings never last forever. Although... they do have a way of coming back. Again, and again. I'm so easy to hurt. So easily dismantled. And I keep putting myself in the path of these terrible, terrible things, worthless fuck up that I am...

My resolve shatters. I sob again, clawing the carpet with my free hand, clutching my cold gin steadily with the other. I pound my feet like a child. I don't want to be here. Don't want to be me. The feeling I have known most of my life, the desperate and psychotic need to simply crawl out of my own skin, has returned. Ellie's down again. It doesn't matter how many birthdays pass, how much I'm sure I've grown up, how far I think I've come. The right impact at the right moment can still send me into a hopeless implosion of self-loathing. Longing for a bottle or a razor or both.

I hate the way it owns me. Somewhere in the background I can always feel it. Dark thick ropes that bind me. It is the answer to the restlessness that has taunted me since childhood. It is the only silence in a world of endless, unbearable noise. It's a voice calling out to me, always, _you'll come back to me._

My mother was needy, too. That must be where I got it from. A bitch on the outside, cool and condescending, but ultimately too insecure to be by herself even for a moment. She fell apart without my father. No sense of self, no sense of reality, just a river of booze and that endless pity-party. I guess that's why I keep getting trapped in these terrible relationships; longing for a man who will be solid and reliable like my father never was, treat me the way my mother always wanted to be treated, make me feel like I mattered the way I never seemed to matter in my own home as a child.

Sure. Right. That must be the reason I'm twenty-eight years old, kicking and screaming. I'm still angry at her. I grow angrier all the time because the reflection in my mirror starts to look more and more like the woman I hate most.

Maybe I'm not exactly like my mother. Maybe it hasn't ruined my life yet. I still manage to function. I maintain some semblance of an ordinary life. I brush my teeth and go to work, things like that. But that doesn't mean that I can't feel it, that I can't watch it govern all of my decisions. The way my schedule seems to build itself around my drinking.

My lips meet the rim of a glass at the slightest onset of emotion. I can't take it, I can't take anything. I used to bleed but now I just pour.

I'm drunk now, I can tell. Can feel the ends of my snotty nose turning pink, slight blush in my face, a comfortable haze in my vision. Can feel all my disparate thoughts melding into a single, frantic stream. Everyone I know, have ever known, is a potential culprit. All the things I've done, the things I haven't done, things I'll never do, they are all now swirling in a blur to be judged. All the wrong is flailing around in the walls of my brain, like a psycho in a padded cell, and all I can see is that big wave of despair. A giant pile of self-pity. Rain, thunderstorms, blizzards, upon the Ellie parade.

There is a standby cliché that's run through my mind a dozen times over: the old, once you hit rock bottom you've got nowhere to go but up. It's the kind of message echoed to me from youth group counselors and teen hotline advocates, the kind of people I used to interview for Caitlin. It's a notion I swallowed blindly for so many of my teen years, thinking it to be an honest and even witty way of cutting to the bone of addiction.

But as an adult, really, I realize that's kind of fucking stupid. There are things much worse than rock bottom, like, I don't know, dead. But even that morbid reality aside, I think people really underestimate the enormity of the gray area that exists between not having a problem, and hitting rock bottom.

I am wandering in the gray, day in, day out, always just one drink away from reaching for the razor again. Always one drink away from the edge. One drink away from losing my job, one drink away from too drunk to function. I dangle, I wait. I wait for the day I finally hit rock bottom, the day I finally have to force myself to change.

And I fucking hate Facebook. I don't ever want to see or know so much about the people around me but I can't _help_ but look because it just gets so fucking lonely sometimes. I'm jealous of everyone, all the time, to the point where I want to scream, all the time.

I make another drink and I crawl, _fucking crawl,_ across the floor of my apartment. I turn up the volume of my Cat Power Pandora playlist louder and cyber-stalk the strange chain of acquaintances that the damned internet won't let me let go of.

Ashley Kerwin. Fucking cow.

I always hated her and somehow clung to her. She was enough like me that I could relate to her drama, but different enough from me that she offered me some kind of sick hope. I hated her, resented her, because she possessed the one quality I never could manage on my own: self-righteous indignation. While the world continued to shit upon Ashley, one fucked up nightmare after another, she never once examined her own weaknesses as culprits in her misery. No, the world was to blame for her agony. And her bitterness kept her afloat in the sea of teenage angst.

All these years later I can still picture the two of us, fourteen years old. Black lipstick and black fishnets, too much hair gel and loud music and misguided anger. I remember playing tough against the world, Ashley by my side. She thought I was made of ice, cool and fearless through and through, and I know that's why she sought me out in grade eight. She wanted to be what she thought I was. That's how teenage girls operate. Trying to find ourselves in someone else.

Ashley Kerwin. _Unfriend._

Paige Michalchuk. Shallow twat. _Unfriend._

Manny Santos? I don't even remember adding her. _Unfriend._

Sean Cameron. He's fat now. He's got a fat girlfriend and really awful tattoos. I thought he would be mine forever. He was the first one to hold me and make me feel safe; kiss my scars and make me feel pretty. I thought I'd never have to go back to the woman I hated, because Sean Cameron's calloused mechanic's hands would shield me from her. I thought this rough-and-tumble bleach-blonde boy was really going to save me from my fourteen-year-old abyss. The idiot never even graduated high school.

Time tells such a strange story. God. That was fourteen years ago. God. Sean Cameron. _Unfriend._

Craig Man- oh god, _UNFRIEND UNFRIEND UNFRIEND._

This could go on all night, I realize, sucking the lime. My drunk eyes flutter open and closed a few times as I squint at the glowy blue screen in my lap. I could relive every step of my weird life, through high school, through college, through years of memories and people who ultimately just ended up disappointing me. So drunk now. Can't even think straight. Lost in a blur of this vague sense of betrayal. But it's not the distant faces on my computer screen that let me down, I know that. I want it to be anyone's fault but mine, but I can't do that. I can't change what's true, I can only drown it.

I slurp my beverage and type, slowly, correcting my typos several times before hitting "Post:"

_Where's rock bottom when you need it?_

Marco del Rossi "comments" almost immediately. Ugh. Why is he even awake right now?

_What's the matter boo? :(_

I roll my eyes and put the laptop on the ground. I carefully tilt the glass so that I can ease more gin into my mouth even as I lay my face on the carpet to fall asleep. In the morning, I will be embarrassed and delete my Facebook post. Marco will meet me for coffee to soothe my hangover. He'll talk me up, I'll feel better. I'll meet a new guy again soon. I'll get really into work for awhile. I might even send my mom a nice e-mail or call Paige just to chat. I'll buy new jeans and get a new haircut and life will go on.

But in that haze of gray I know,_ I know, _that restlessness will come again. That voice, that constant unfulfilled void inside me, calling out to me, always, _you'll come back to me._


End file.
